UO Second Age

Kaivan wrote:It should be noted that during the era, it was possible to transfer animals such as nightmares to non-tamers by releasing the animal.

In order to provide an official explanation that I expect to be quoted in the future regarding this mechanic:

According to all available sources, when an animal that was tamed during T2A was released or went wild, the amount of skill that it took to re-tame that creature was set to zero. That is, if a player tamed a creature that took 8 billion skill to tame and then subsequently released it, a newbie character with 50 begging and 50 forensic evaluation could walk up and have a rough 50/50 chance of taming that creature because the re-tame value was set to zero. This functionality continued until the introduction 1/24/2000 patch notes which added in the owner list and the increased difficulty for taming creatures.

Kaivan wrote:I must have missed that thread (which is really rare), otherwise I would have commented on it.

It's possible to find comments from many in-era sources that talk about the re-tame value being zero. In fact, many of them will outright say that a zero re-tame value is indicated by the message "That was not even challenging...", which would be obtained any time that anyone tamed a creature that had already been tamed. In terms of the code, if your chance to succeed was beyond a certain point, you would automatically succeed at that taming attempt and would receive that message. Since none of the sources mention any exception to that rule, it is clear that the rule was a ubiquitous one, and would necessarily include many creatures (think bulls on up) that would not display that message unless their taming requirement was severely diminished upon being released or going wild (a la zero re-tame). Given that, it is clear that a zero re-tame value was proper for the era.

nightshark wrote: So in short, my tank mage should be able to tame a previously tamed dragon?

Mens Rea wrote:

nightshark wrote: So in short, my tank mage should be able to tame a previously tamed dragon?

Yes, you could actually do this.

Derrick wrote:That is the case here, however the minimum tame skill requirement does not get zeroed, only the difficulty.

* A fix for pet commands including the “pet friend bug”.
* Saying “stop” to your pet will clear any previous commands.
* Pets will remember who their previous owners were. Previous owners are defined as anyone who tames the pet or has the pet transferred to them.
o The more previous owners a pet has had, the more difficult it will be for other players to tame it if it goes wild. This also means that players who were not a previous owner to the pet can tame the pet for skill gain.
o Any previous owner may retame the pet regardless of their skill.
* Pets that go wild will become more difficult to control. This change will affect both previous and new owners.
* If line-of-site is broken during the taming process, the attempt will automatically fail.
* When transferring a pet to another player, the previous owner and the new owner will now receive the proper confirmation messages.
* Pets will now only guard their owner’s corpse.
* Fixes for various messages with relation to pet commands. Tamers who give commands to their pets that the pet does not follow will find that their pets will go wild faster than previously

I'm starting to think the cutoff date for what is defined as 'T2A' needs to just be adjusted. People have found so many nice and fun patches that always tend to be just out of 'era' reach.